After the End
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: They probably would have died if he hadn't gone back to the beach, and that was why Azazel had done so. He knew also that their reaction to him would be specular, and he enjoyed very much getting reactions from others.


**After The End**

They probably would have died if he hadn't gone back, and that was why Azazel had done so. He liked very much the idea of having such people beholden to him. Azazel knew also that their reaction to him would be specular, and he enjoyed getting reactions from others. He had much experience in mapping the way an individual might respond to the realization that Azazel had taken his life from him, but he knew less about how someone might react to find that his life had been given back, and he was curious.

They'd rallied around Xavier when he'd appeared on the beach with a swirl of black and red smoke, and the woman had pointed her silly gun at him. There were things he might have said then – clever things, funny things, things that might have cut more sharply than his blades – but his English was a traitorous thing; at moments like this it was apt to abandon him completely. He cocked his head and stared down at Xavier, and felt that this gave the most impressive impression.

Strangely enough, it was the Beast that seemed to first judge his intentions correctly. He spoke to the others, and a flurry of debate which Azazel did not try particularly hard to follow broke out, over whether they should trust him or wait for some other aid to materialize. Azazel turned his head to look toward the war ships, aligned in front of the island; they were launching smaller boats now, each vessel full of soldiers and each soldier holding a weapon, and Azazel did not believe that their intentions toward those on the beach were kind. He was not especially concerned – he could leave very quickly if necessary, after all – but other eyes had followed his gaze, and now the topic of debate had changed; now they were discussing where best to take Xavier and how he could be moved without risking further injury.

When they had reached their consensus the other had fallen silence to allow the Beast to come again to the fore to give Azazel instruction. Azazel had not thought especially much of the other man before and did not now, but her wore his de facto leadership well. Xavier had to be kept flat against the ground when he was moved, was that possible? the Beast wanted to know. Xavier had a 'spinal injury,' he said.

_What is 'spinal?'_ Azazel had been about to ask, but then his mind finally made sense of the words that Xavier had been whispering over and over again in a slurred drone - "I can't feel my legs. I can't feel my legs. I can't feel my legs." - and then he understood.

Azazel transported away, but not very far – not so far that he couldn't hear the Beast's outraged roar over his disappearance. The wall of the submarine's medical bay had become a ceiling, but the folded canvas stretcher was still there, and he took it down from its hooks. He stepped into the bridge and found his captain's hat wedge in a corner under one of the navigational panels, and placed it jauntily on his head. Then he paused to wonder if there was anything else here that he should take away with himself; there was some jewelry in Emma's room that he believed she would have wanted to keep, but Shaw had given her that jewelry and Shaw was over with, so he did not fetch it.

Azazel returned to the beach with the stretcher in hand, and waited impassively as the others loaded Xavier onto it carefully. The Beast was buzzing in his ear, fussy and insistent. "Johns Hopkins," he kept saying, "Do you know where that is? In Baltimore."

"_Da_, and be quiet," Azazel growled the third time the Beast asked him this. He had only the vaguest idea of where Baltimore was, and the Beast's insistence that they should go there and nowhere else annoyed him. Havana Hospital was much closer, and though Azazel himself had never set foot inside a hospital, he had heard that the care provided there was excellent. He considered briefly the possibility of simply leaving them in Havana, but he had a vague notion that this might create problems for them with _at least_ one government, if not several. Xavier meant something to Erik – Azazel was not sure exactly what, but something – and the blue girl, who had joined them not an hour previously, seemed to have some attachment to him as well. Out of consideration for those two he closed his eyes, seeking out Baltimore and then Baltimore's hospitals in his mind's eye, searching for the one the Beast had named. He opened his eyes, nodded once to himself, and then crouched down beside Xavier.

"Comrade," he said softly, offering his hand. Xavier reached out and clutched it like a drowning man with both of his own. His grip was desperately strong but his flesh clammy, wet with sweat and much too cold. Azazel believed that he was in shock. To his left the Beast had stepped in to take Azazel's free hand, and the two boys and then the woman had lined up and linked hands as well.

There was a panicked fear and a pleading in Xavier's eyes as he looked up at him, but Azazel did not believe that he was even really being seen by the other man. His fear did not come from the thought that this might be a trick – he had no suspicion that Azazel might drop or otherwise harm him; rather, it came from a sense of growing horror at the betrayal of his own body. "I can't feel my legs," he told Azazel, and his voice begged for correction, to be told that he was wrong – that he was simply confused, that his legs were fine and this could all still be taken back.

There was nothing good that Azazel might have told him that would not have been a lie, so he kept silent. He took a deep breath, rallying his powers to carry the added weight of so many others on so long a journey, and then they went.


End file.
